Entertainment Desk:

Popular theatre troupe Batighar returns to the National stage this month with the 25th performance of its politically sharp one-act, “Monkey Trial”. The silver-jubilee production will be staged on Friday (September 19), at 7:15pm in the Experimental Theatre of the National Theatre Hall, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.

Adapted and directed by Muktanil from the work of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee, “Monkey Trial” reimagines the 1925 Scopes trial — the landmark courtroom clash over the teaching of Darwinian evolution in an American classroom. The play follows an ordinary schoolteacher who, after introducing evolution in class, is prosecuted under reactionary law and thrust into a national controversy that exposed the fault lines between dogma and reason.

Muktanil’s production keeps the story urgent and immediate: spare staging foregrounds pointed dialogue, while music and ensemble work puncture solemnity with dark humour. Batighar’s version asks an unmistakable question for our time — how much have we truly moved on since the Scopes moment? On social media, the director invited audiences to the jubilee night with a blunt challenge: “Come see how far we have fallen in a century.”

First mounted on December 31, 2021, as Batighar’s 15th production, “Monkey Trial” has steadily found an audience for its unflinching satire and civic alarm. The company reports that advance tickets for the 25th show are already on sale online.

The rehearsal-room intimacy of the Experimental Theatre suits the piece: without spectacle, actors can inhabit the moral and rhetorical tightrope of the trial. For theatregoers interested in drama that interrogates law, science, and popular belief, Batighar’s silver-jubilee performance promises to be both timely and unsettling.